A journey of finding primordial purity of thought,word and action within oneself.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Why am I optimistic about change?

Imagine that you placed two gold
coins on the first square of a chess board. If you kept doubling the number of
gold coins for each and every square, how many coins do you think will be there
on the last square (64th)?

18000000000000000000 (18 followed by
18 zeroes)

Can you imagine that number in your
head? I mean we can all visualize 2 birds, 5 trees, 10 buildings, a few hundred
people, even a few lakhs and crores of money(Our politicians seem to have the
acumen to deal in many more zeroes than us citizens though!).

Malcolm Gladwell articulates this cognitive
principle of 'Tipping Point' brilliantly through a lot of social examples. His main
idea in the book is how little unprecedented things can actually create a
social movement and the factors which lead to that critical mass for the
movement to explode. To further break it down, human mind does not have the cognitive ability to
comprehend geometric progressions or in other words, big socially impactful
movements (read World Wars, computer, internet etc.)

There are a few other mathematical
theories to highlight the same principle (Long Tail, Butterfly effect etc.) but
I will focus on one which really appealed to me - The Black Swan theory

The Black Swan Theory or Theory
of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that some
events happen and taken all us by surprise, like the name used to represent it.
It is very rare that we come across a Black Swan in our lifetime. The legend
goes that the English did not believe such a thing existed till they came
across one. Therefore, it is only in hindsight do we come to terms with the
fact of the event.

·The tail events which are extremely
rare and highly improbable but not impossible. There exists a small probability
of occurrence of such events in sciences and social sciences which happen to
shape new frontiers.

·Given the low probability of
occurrence of such events, usually less odds than 1 in a million, it is
difficult to use mathematical models to predict them.

·Because of the nature of rarity and
uncertainty of such events, the psychological biases human minds have towards
low occurrence-high impact events.

Black Swan Events were characterized
in his book The Black Swan. Taleb regards almost all major scientific
discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as "black
swans"—undirected and unpredicted. He cites the examples of World Wars,
personal computer, Internet, 9/11 to prove his point.

Therefore, there are three major
takeaways from a Black Swan event. First, that nothing in the past can
potentially anticipate the possibility of its occurrence. It is clearly outside
the realm of regular expectations and an outlier on a probability distribution.
Second, most black swan events carry an extreme impact on society. Third, in
spite of our inability to predict such events, human mind tends to find causal
links to such an event in hindsight. The author argues that almost everything
in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of
historical events, to elements of our own personal lives can be explained
through these events.

In my opinion, this is how change
and social movements happen. We must surely reason on a daily basis. We must definitely
plan for the uncertain future. We must ardently strive to achieve our planned
goals. But we cannot predict our Black Swan moments. Life is purely
probabilistic. And, at the tail of such a probability distribution is a black
swan event waiting to happen in our life time. Therefore, we must believe at
some level that high impact change is possible. It might not be around the
corner and predictable, but there is some mathematical argument to believing
the impossible is probable as well.

So ask yourselves, what is the
‘Black Swan’ moment that you can ‘probably’ dream of? What can you do to tip
the scales of change in India?

About Me

Indian by nationality, journeyman by choice, and will be something by destiny.I seek the most sought after question in human history - Who am I? And,hopefully in the process demystify some elements of the physical, and the metaphysical world around me.